Page 85 of No Control

And I know he did it for me.

He did it to keep the attention off me when I returned home. No sheriff deputies came knocking on my door. No police interviewed me or asked me questions. No, he led them right to the body. By the time I stepped off the flight, Mason’s body was discovered with a trail of clues leading them right to that backyard.

Duke groans as he shifts on the other end of the couch, eyeing me.

“You still miss him?” I ask, laughing emptily. I blink the tears away and pull out my phone, searching for someone to talk to. No one knows what happened to me. Not even Emma. They think I was grieving Mason’s death in solace, not falling in love with someone else. Well, Emma thinks I fucked the grief out of my system.

And I let her think that.

She’s going through enough as it is, trying to divorce Jared—and she thinks I’m better now than ever. Maybe I am. But it sure as hell doesn’t feel that way.

My phone ringing jars me from my daze, and I pick it up, answering it when I see the private investigator’s name. “Hey, Shana.”

“Hey…” her voice trails off.

“You haven’t found him, have you?”

She sighs. “Henry Bayne doesn’t exist anymore, but I can’t find an obituary or signs of death either.”

Of course.

By the time I had wi-fi calling again as my phone rebooted that night, all signs of Henry were gone. I was left with nothing. There were no more properties, all ownership to other people—real people. There were no signs of Cher Bayne, either. It was as if neither of them ever existed.

“I’ll keep looking into him. I think you got scammed. You know that happens sometimes.”

The hundred-fifty-grand in my bank account is not a scam.

“I don’t know, maybe we should stop,” I say flatly, my eyes casting to my laptop. There’s a completed manuscript on there. Because whether he cared or not, I wrote the book. I wrote the book for him—of him. I just haven’t published it yet.

Because I’m terrified my plan won’t work.

Shana keeps talking. “There’s bound to be some trace of him, I just can’t find any other aliases. Most of the time conmen have other names.”

“He had another name years ago,” I tell her. “But I don’t know what it was.” And that’s the truth. Not even Cher told me the names they were born with. I’ve dug into the history of New York crimes, too, researching house fires that resulted in deaths.

But newsflash, there’s a lot of them. “Do you know when that was?”

“No.”

“Ugh, he’s good at disappearing.”

“Yeah, he is,” I say. “Thanks for the update.”

We hang up and I toss the phone down beside me, laying my head on the arm of the couch and squeezing my eyes shut. I forgave Henry once I made it home, once I was right back to the grind of daily life. He did what he knew how to do, but everything fell together when he told me he loved me.

And he let me go.

I can’t sleep. I don’t date. I don’t want to connect with people. I coped by writing the story of a hitman, living life on the edge until he meets a writer. He does the wrong thing to win her over, but gives her exactly what she needs. She starts to realize everything she missed out on by settling. They fall in love. He breaks her heart. She forgives him.

She forgives him.

And he comes back. He comes back and tells her that he’ll never leave. He vows to protect her always, to love her, and to take care of her dog. She tells him she accepts his darkness and loves him not in spite of it, but because it’s part of him. And she loves all of him.

But that’s just a book.

And this is real life.

A tear slips down my cheek for the first time in months, and I let the heartbreak slip under the blockade I’ve built around myself. I bat it away with the sleeve of my sweater. It’s time to rip the Band-Aid off.

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